The Philippines is one of the deadliest countries on earth to be a journalist, we cannot allow Maria Ressa to be next

“You cannot go back. The writing is on the wall. Look at Jamal, look at Daphne. Please don’t get on that plane.” These were the arguments swirling in my head over dinner with the internationally celebrated editor Maria Ressa in February, in the shadow of London Bridge. She was preparing to fly back to the Philippines and I was invoking the brutal murder with impunity of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi Arabian embassy, and the state-linked assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

I did not draw these comparisons lightly, and I was not alone in drawing them. But Ressa is relentlessly optimistic, and the sense of responsibility she has for her team at Rappler – the news start-up she founded in 2011 – is unwavering. She was never going to abrogate what she believed was her duty.

So, she got back on a plane bound for Manila to face the prospect of jail, or worse, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to throw a cloak over the ongoing harassment campaign waged against her by the government of President Rodrigo Duterte and his army of patriotic trolls.

Ressa entered my life in 2014 as a journalistic source and a research subject. Now, she is someone I regard as a close friend. So, for me, the concerns about her freedom and safety ricocheting globally are both professional and personal.

On Monday, the woman I think of as journalism’s “North Star” was convicted by a Manila court on a trumped-up criminal cyber libel charge, in a case that hinged on a typo. Along with her co-accused Rey Santos Jnr, she faces up to six years in jail for that conviction. But that’s not where it ends. Ressa still has seven other cases hanging over her head. In total, she could spend almost a century behind bars for publishing journalism – reportage that revealed the scale of Duterte’s campaign of extrajudicial killings in his so-called “war on drugs”, and big data investigations documenting the state-linked troll armies that destabilised Philippines’ democracy and targeted Rappler and Ressa.

“I want Maria Ressa to be raped repeatedly to death, I would be so happy if that happens when martial law is declared, it would bring joy to my heart”. – The text of a Facebook post tagging Maria Ressa from early 2017

Ressa tells people that I was the one who first convinced her to speak publicly and “shine a light” on the relentless, brutal, gendered harassment she experienced as part of the state-sponsored disinformation campaign against her. By the time she told me her story for a UN-commissioned book on journalism safety in mid-2017, she’d already lost count of the number of death threats she’d received. We sat down for our interview two days before the book went to press. In that moment she became a media freedom activist – an international symbol of women journalists’ resistance against political strongmen, and the targeted campaigns of online violence designed to shut them up. 

That moves me. But it also fills me with a sense of terrible responsibility – the kind of responsibility we ethical journalists feel when we convince someone to speak candidly in the public interest, revealing their pain and fear in the process; then have to watch as a tonne of bricks comes tumbling down upon them. But Maria Ressa will never be buried in the rubble, as she made clear to me in 2017:

“It began a spiral of silence. Anyone who was critical or asked questions about extrajudicial killings was attacked, brutally attacked. The women got it worst… And we’ve realised that the system is set up to silence dissent – designed to make journalists docile. We’re not supposed to be asking hard questions, and we’re certainly not supposed to be critical. But I go and do the story even harder! I Just refuse to let intimidation win.”

“Over the years, we watched the former Prime Minister of Malta Joseph Muscat and his cronies pursue increasingly deranged attacks on Daphne. These included online abuse and harassment campaigns, vexatious tax investigations, false criminal charges that were thrown out of court, and civil and criminal libel suits.

“Daphne died with five criminal libel charges and 43 civil libel suits pending against her.

“This targeted harassment, chillingly similar to that perpetrated against Maria Ressa, created the conditions for Daphne’s murder.

“The government of the Philippines is creating the possibility of a violent attack against Maria and other journalists.

“Its targeted legal harassment of Maria identifies her to Duterte’s officials and supporters as an enemy, implicitly granting them permission for further attacks.

“Media institutions all over the world recognise this and are already unanimous in their support of Maria. It is beyond time for the government of the Philippines to drop all charges against Maria and her colleagues. If it fails to do so, it risks an escalation towards violence.”

“She has become a cause célèbre for speaking boldly and publicly against those threats. I know that she has said publicly before, and she would want me to say again, that the international community’s support for her and for her capacity to do independent journalism under threat is something that was very meaningful and allowed the organisation Rappler to continue to operate with a sense of being shielded. 

“As much as the international mechanisms are important, there is also the collective action that can support journalists on the ground to continue to report under the threat of enormous pressure and fear of violence. We have multiple roles to fulfil in that regard. We also have a role as the international journalistic community to not just lobby and speak in environments such as this, but report robustly… on some of these threats, because there is evidence that shining a light… to enable our colleagues to speak truth to power makes a difference.”